Language Change in Subcarpathia

The countries of eastern Europe have seen radical border changes throughout their history. During the last century, following major shifts in political power, individuals and communities have struggled to keep a linguistic and national identity amidst the rule of often oppressive ruling governments. One such area of interest is that of Subcarpathia in the modern-day southwest Ukraine. This region was originally part of Hungary. After The Treaty of Trianon following World War I, this area was given to then Czechoslovakia. Other areas of Hungary were distributed to many neighboring countries, causing Hungary to lose about 70% of the land it previously held and about 65% of its previous inhabitants. The region of Subcarpathia was rejoined to Hungary briefly during World War II and then stripped again at the war's conclusion and handed over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialists Republic. How has this political juggling affected the Hungarian language of this area's inhabitants?

A walk through the region of Subcarpathia today reveals a merging of two worlds. Street and city names are still often written in the two languages of the region. Many villages in this area still maintain a Hungarian speaking majority while much of the official business and education is conducted in Ukrainian. Because linguistic analysis of this kind was not permitted until after the fall of communism, areas like that of Subcarpathia offer linguists a unique opportunity to study language stratification that has occurred over the course of almost a century.

I recently read one such study conducted in the summer of 1996 and published in volume 19 of Multilingua in 2000. The article is titled The Sociolinguistic Stratification of Hungarian in Subcarpathia. Linguists from the University of Szeged in Hungary went to various regions of Subcarpathia to evaluate the manner in which Hungarian was spoken. Nearly 150 adult minority Hungarians were studied, representing various age groups, education levels, and locales. They were given a questionnaire and asked to fill in the missing word of a sentence. In each question there were only two possible answer choices-- one that was considered to be standard Hungarian based on similar surveys conducted in Hungary and one that was considered to be non-standard. The non-standard forms are considered by those living in Hungary to be associated with lower education levels and rural lifestyle. The group hypothesized that ethnic Hungarians of Subcarpathia would be more likely to choose the non-standard forms.

The results of the study seem to support the experimenters' hypothesis. Hungarian-speakers of Subcarpathia were more likely in almost all instances to choose the non-standard form than Hungarian nationals. However, the results raised an interesting point--that sociolinguistic stratification is by no means a uniform process. While there were some trends among age, locale, education level, etc, language change among individuals was largely unpredictable. There are so many factors that play in to this kind of stratification that effectively measuring all of them would be nearly impossible.

The study raises some interesting questions. How does the political language affect the native language? How does this differ in areas with stronger political assertion? What will the Hungarian language of Subcarpathia look like yet a hundred years from now? Will it still be spoken?